


my eyes have been sharpening themselves

by monsterq



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Infertility, Mutual Caretaking, Past Suicide Attempt, Post-Episode: s01e08 Much More, Witchcraft, ritual self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24622450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterq/pseuds/monsterq
Summary: After Sodden, Yennefer finds an unfamiliar spell and decides to give having a child one last try. It doesn't work the way she expects.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	1. only the sparsest stars

**Author's Note:**

> Titles from ["Stars over the Dordogne"](https://allpoetry.com/Stars-Over-The-Dordogne) by Sylvia Plath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "real witch spells."

It always starts with blood.

Yennefer of Vengerberg has known this since she was young. She has seen infants enter the world, their screams picking up where their mothers’ left off, their tiny bodies smeared with gore. She’s seen hands split open from the friction of tools before calluses could harden the skin. She’s seen pigs and chickens slaughtered, dirt soaked dark and pungent where they were dragged away—and death is an ending, yes, but each ending is the beginning of what follows, just as every beginning requires an end.

There is always a cost, and to Yennefer, this one is inconsequential. She has bled for much, much less.

Ingredients gathered, she clears a space to work. Herbs and chalk go on a low table, but she sets the book on the ground. Every time she touches it, she’s surprised how slight it is. The potential it contains should be bigger, heavier. But haven’t people thought the same of her?

After Sodden, drained and reeling, she took refuge in this empty cottage. There was no village for miles, and the sky, far from the clog of smoke, was huge and blank. As soon as she walked in the door, she felt the echo of past magic, as thick as cobwebs. It was a few days later that she found the book in a box of useless treasures. Undyed leather bound the pages, which were covered in a cramped scrawl of uneven ink. Every word of it was Elder. That was why she stopped pacing the tiny hut and empty fields long enough to flip through the pages, where she found, in minutes, this. And something old and knotted gave a cramp of pain inside her.

_The sorceress will never regain her womb,_ Borch said. But surely stranger things have happened. If destiny could give Geralt of fucking Rivia a child, after a fashion, why not her?

There’s nothing to be lost by trying, she thinks, even as her imagination points out how wrong she is.

On the bare floor, she copies symbols in chalk. In a wooden bowl, she throws the herbs, a mass of green and purple and white, then grinds them as fine as she can manage. Their juices stain the wood; she can smell them, bittersweet and stinging in her nose.

Finally, Yennefer takes up her knife, calls upon her magic, and opens the meat of her arm over the bowl. Déjà vu wells up along with the blood— _a shattered mirror, the thin skin of her wrists, helpless despair a growth inside her throat_ —as it mingles with power and soaks into the herbs.

Gritting her teeth against a wash of dizziness, she watches until a centimeter of dark liquid covers the remains of stems and flowers. Then she bandages the wound tightly with her other hand and teeth before cupping the bowl in both hands and closing her eyes. She can’t afford to waste power on healing, as her full strength has yet to return in the week since Sodden.

It always starts with blood, but life has movement, too. It changes and grows. There is more than the beginning.

Slowly, bubbles appear in the fluid. One or two, born and burst in a span of seconds—but in a minute the surface is fizzing, the mixture alive, herbs frothing as they dissolve. The stew is climbing higher now, creeping up the wood. The floral, coppery perfume is so strong Yennefer can taste it.

When the liquid reaches the brim, the bowl full and heavier than its contents can explain, she calls out a phrase in Elder, and the old wood cracks. The thick mixture spatters to the floor, to the cluster of sketched symbols, and smokes where it lands. She falls back on her heels, panting.

And waits.

She doesn’t expect it to work, she tells herself. Not really, not after everything she’s tried. After this, she’ll stop.

_You knew the cost of enchantment._

If it does work, though, what will happen? The spell doesn’t specify how or when she’ll get her baby. With so major a gap, it’s foolish to perform it at all, but…

She won’t imagine a child in her arms, on her hip, in her home. She won’t imagine touching and talking and teaching. She won’t imagine listening, laughing, loving. Being loved.

Yennefer stays crouched there on the floor, panting, heart racing, still light headed. On top of all that, her eyesight has gone blurry.

No. Not her eyesight.

A patch of air in front of her is shimmering. As Yennefer watches warily, defensive magic at her fingertips, patches of color appear as if through fog: blue, black, ash white.

Then it swells—fast enough she nearly lashes out—darkens like a bruise, and disgorges a girl on Yennefer’s smoking, bloodstained floor.

The portal is gone. The girl stares at Yennefer, half-crouched, panting, eyes wide as a cornered animal’s, and Yennefer stares back.

“Who are you?” the girl asks first. Her white-blonde hair is streaked with mud and tangled with twigs.

“You first, if you don’t mind,” Yennefer says, much more calmly than she feels. Is fate taunting her with someone else’s child? She looks so small to Yennefer, but she must be half-grown, not much younger than Yennefer was when she was taken to Aretuza.

The girl draws in a breath, gaze flicking across her. “Yennefer?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re Yennefer of Vengerberg, aren’t you? Your eyes.”

Yennefer is off balance, and there’s nothing she hates more. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me,” she says coldly and far too truthfully. Inside her, chaos is itching for an outlet, but she will not harm a child, not unless she is forced to. “Your name, please?”

“Ci—Fi—” The girl hesitates, biting her lip and studying Yennefer’s face. “Ciri,” she finishes.

Yennefer squelches the urge to address her as Cificiri. “And you—” she begins to ask, before the answer hits her like a blow to the stomach. That day on the mountain. Geralt’s admission. She dug the story from an unusually brooding Jaskier on the way back down. “You’re the child surprise. _Geralt’s_ child surprise.”

Slowly, the girl—Ciri—nods.

_For fuck’s sake,_ thinks Yennefer.

It’s true. Fate is playing a joke on her. She will never be free of Geralt of Rivia. For a childish moment, she glares at the book lying harmlessly on the floor, pages spread like hands in a gesture of innocence. _You know full well I wanted a baby,_ she thinks, _MY baby,_ and then she drags her attention back to Geralt’s child surprise.

But before she can speak, Ciri asks, “How did you know what happened?”

Yennefer blinks at her. “Sorry?”

“I mean, how did you know to bring me here now?” Ciri rephrases, clearing up exactly nothing. “Were you watching us?”

Yennefer sifts through that for a moment before asking, “You and Geralt were in trouble?” Despite herself, her pulse quickens.

“You didn’t know?” Ciri frowns. “But then why—”

“Never mind that. Tell me what happened.”

“We were ambushed. Nilfgaard. There were a lot of them, and Geralt tried to take them all and yelled at me to run, and I did, but some of them chased me, and he tried to stop them, and then I couldn’t hear him anymore, and I tried to lose them, and I’d just found somewhere to hide when…” She takes a breath and gestures at Yennefer. “Here I am.”

“I see,” Yennefer says, buying time. Time Geralt may not have. But surely he can take care of himself, a big bad witcher against some trifling humans. And if he can’t, why is that Yennefer’s concern? She made it clear a year ago—to him and to fate and to the world—that she wanted nothing more to do with him. Geralt of Rivia is no longer Yennefer’s problem.

She looks at the wide-eyed girl standing in front of her, waiting for Yennefer’s help. “Fuck,” she says aloud.

Ciri laughs. “Now you sound like him.”

She’s doing it for the girl, and only for the girl, she tells herself as she beckons Ciri closer so she can feel the resonance of her last location. This child may not be Yennefer’s, a spell book’s mockery aside, but she is a child, and she’s done nothing to deserve Yennefer’s grudge. Ciri needs safety and freedom, and she needs Geralt.

If Yennefer’s lucky, this will be quick.


	2. their disguise so bright

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "witchcraft."

Before she can second-guess herself, she makes a portal and pulls Ciri through. On the other side, the ground is thick with snow, and trees block out the sky. She hides herself and the girl from view and listens.

There. Is it a sound on the edge of hearing, or is it the magic that connects her to Geralt? Irrelevant. She beckons Ciri on.

Snow crunches underfoot, and she snuffs out the sound and wipes away their footsteps with more magic. There are no birdcalls, no rustles in the underbrush; it’s as if they are the only living beings in the forest, Yennefer and Ciri, and even they move like ghosts between the trees.

No, she realizes: not the only ones.

A Nilfgaardian soldier is trekking through the woods in their direction, eyes scanning the trees, feet digging deep into the dirty snow. Yennefer feels Ciri stiffening beside her, but his gaze sweeps across them without recognition. When they reach each other, Yennefer reaches out to touch his helmet, and he drops midstep.

“Is he dead?” Ciri whispers.

“No. He’ll wake in an hour and head home, uncertain why he was here at all, and certainly with no memory of you.”

“What if he freezes?”

Yennefer turns to stare at the child. Ciri stares back, a crease between her pale brows.

“He’ll be fine,” Yennefer says finally, and she keeps walking. Through the muddy snow, churned by frantic feet. Toward her awareness of Geralt of Rivia. Toward the man she swore never to seek out again.

She hears no clash of swords, no twang of bows, and can’t guess if that’s a good sign or a bad one.

Geralt on his knees in the snow, though, blood running from the corner of his mouth and dripping down to stain the snow like berries—that’s clear enough.

He’s surrounded. Nine soldiers still standing, and ordinarily that would be little obstacle, but clearly he’s been wounded—stabbed in the back, she sees, circling around with Ciri trailing after her—and his hands are bound behind him in dimeritium shackles. His swords have been flung away, far from his reach. The soldiers are discussing whether they can use him as bait to catch the princess without getting killed themselves.

Ciri is tense as a bowstring behind her, and Yennefer wonders if she’ll have to hold her back. She wants to think Geralt has a plan, but his head hangs down toward the snow, thick blood stringing from his mouth.

She’ll have to handle it, then.

“Stay here,” she tells the child, privately putting even odds on whether she’ll obey. Yennefer paces a ring around the tableau, footsteps vanishing as she makes them, the crunch of her steps dying out beyond her body. Clockwise, then counterclockwise, and there are quicker ways to do this, but she can’t risk getting it wrong.

Or Geralt and the girl will die. The fear that tightens her chest betrays her.

The spell clicks into place, and the soldiers crumple all at once. No—they crumble. Armor falls empty to the snow, helmets and pauldrons scattering, and Ciri cries out as Geralt raises his head.

The wash of dizziness that follows is more infuriating than surprising. Dropping the invisibility, she breathes through it and strides to him as Ciri rushes over. “Can you stand?”

“Yennefer,” he whispers. Then, “Ciri!” Pupils wide, hair coming free of its tie, mouth parted. She can’t bear to look at him and turns away to search the vacated armor. Sure enough, a key to the shackles. Now, of course, she has to touch him. _Get a grip on yourself, Yennefer._

“Geralt, you’re hurt,” Ciri says. She’s scanning him, up and down and up again, looking for more injuries, as if the one isn’t enough.

His shoulders flex as he tries to reach for her, arms trapped behind his back. “Fine. I’ll be fine. They didn’t catch you.” He’s looking her over too, drinking down the sight as if parched, and Yennefer can’t watch.

Ciri shakes her head. “The soldiers. Did you kill them?” she asks Yennefer.

“No,” Yennefer tells her. Though perhaps that was foolish of her. She doesn’t want to think about her reasoning, but at least the conversation distracts her as she unshackles Geralt in as businesslike a manner as possible. The back of his armor is wet with blood; the wound looks to be clear of his spine and major organs, which is something. “I sent them away.”

“Without their clothes?” Ciri looks critically at the scattered uniforms.

“Clearly.”

“Yen…” Geralt shakes his head. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re welcome,” she informs him tartly, then sighs. “I don’t have time to explain. We need to leave before you get in any more trouble. You didn’t answer. Can you walk? I can’t spare the strength to heal you yet.”

He grunts, pushing to his feet. “Yes. Potions…with Roach. To stop the bleeding, neutralize the toxin.”

Of course there’s a toxin. “Where is she?”

He doesn’t answer, just whistles for his horse.

“She ran when we were attacked,” Ciri says. She points. “That way.”

As Yennefer looks, three things happen at once.

Something crunches in the snow behind her. Ciri cries out. And Geralt casts Aard.

She turns in time to see another Nilfgaardian soldier slam into a tree and crumple, unconscious.

“Should’ve heard him coming,” Geralt says. He looks upset, or confused, or maybe just in pain. “I didn’t smell him. Nothing.”

“All the more reason to leave,” Yennefer says, and she’s pleased she doesn’t sound shaken. “Is your horse coming or not?” Geralt is swaying with the magical exertion on top of blood loss. She goes to him, offers her shoulder. When he rejects it, she glares, and he gingerly allows her to take a fraction of his bulk.

“She’ll come,” he says. “She never goes far. Just far enough to stay alive.”

“Cleverer than you.”

He shakes his head. “What are you doing now?”

“Saving you.”

“I mean your magic. My medallion is still vibrating.”

Something prickles the back of her neck, a thick feeling sweeping through the air. Heavy and growing heavier, too fast to fight, almost too fast to understand, and she looks around wildly for the mage, but no one’s there. Geralt growls, stumbling, and now she’s dizzy again, struggling to stay conscious—

And Ciri screams.

It’s not like the cry she gave before. It’s not like anything Yennefer has ever heard, raw with fury and desperation but underlined with power that shakes the very earth. She suddenly remembers what Jaskier told her when they were coming down the mountain—the banquet where Geralt claimed Ciri, yet unborn. Her mother’s power.

And then she remembers Sodden and the scream that tore from her own voice, the power in it scorching her throat as it blazed into the world. For a moment the voices overlap in her mind, this day and that one, Ciri’s scream and her own, the chaos inside them flooding free. Behind Ciri’s voice is the roar of something a hundred times her size, something ancient. Around them, the trees shake, snow crashing to the ground—and that ground begins to crumble, a crack lengthening and widening between the trees. Somewhere not too far away, a horse gives a panicked whinny and, Yennefer would wager, flees in the direction it came.

It’s then that Fringilla blinks into view like lightning, struggling and finally failing to cling to her illusion. For only a moment she’s there, scrambling for a spell, and then the gulf in the ground swallows her whole.

Ciri’s voice dies. She falls to her knees, gasping for breath. The feeling of magic in the air fizzles, Ciri’s raging flood and Fringilla’s smothering blanket. As the ground steadies, Yennefer crawls forward—she doesn’t remember falling—and peers into the chasm. Fringilla is motionless at the bottom. Dead or unconscious, she doesn’t know, and she’s not waiting around to find out.

The cut on her arm aches. “Enough,” she says, and with a nauseous lurch they’re elsewhere in the forest, east, the direction Roach fled. She’s overextending herself, but she can worry about that later. Geralt whistles again, and this time, after seconds that feel like minutes, Roach appears. She’s nervous but not panicked, and she allows Geralt to coax her close enough that he can rummage through her saddlebags. When he finds what he’s looking for and takes a long draft, she decides they’ve waited long enough. They’re getting out of here now, even if she has to carry the horse through the portal herself.


	3. a luxury of stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "benign witch."

Back in the cottage they all slump to the floor, except for Roach, who stomps her feet, making her displeasure known. Geralt’s nostrils flare as he takes in the scent of the mess on the floor. He looks at Yennefer but says nothing.

“Geralt, your wound,” Ciri says. “Let me see it.”

He shakes his head. “I need rest and food. That’s all.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Yennefer tells him. “It should be cleaned and bandaged, if only so you don’t bleed all over my floor.”

Poor choice of words. He raises his eyebrows at her and flicks his gaze pointedly to the stains, then says only, “It’s stopped bleeding. But I’ll do mine if you do yours.”

“You’re hurt too?” Ciri asks her.

She sighs. “A scratch. So be it. And what about you, Princess? Any mortal injuries you’re hiding?”

“I’m fine.”

Yennefer studies her. The girl looks tired, drawn, and Yennefer thinks again of Sodden. “Thirsty?”

Ciri admits, “A bit.”

There’s a pitcher of water from the well on the table, and Yennefer pours them each a mug. She scrubs her hands, sets water to boil, and sends Ciri to fetch the basket of rags and potions.

Meanwhile, pieces of Geralt’s armor thump one by one to the ground. She turns to see him peeling off his shirt, face like stone.

“Can you even reach that?” she asks, walking around behind him to see the wound, which indeed has already clotted. His shoulders tense, and she wonders if he expects her to stab him in the back too. It almost offends her.

She’s no coward. If she were to stab him, they’d be facing one another.

As she walks back over to sterilize the rags, Geralt reaches for one from the basket. She swats his hand away. “Leave it. Wait for a clean one.”

“Don’t need a clean one.”

He sounds like a petulant toddler. “Too bad.”

Shortly, she sucks the heat from the water and pulls out enough rags to clean both injuries. She’s distracted from unwrapping her bandage by Geralt’s awkward, blind swiping at his wound. Damn it. If she has to watch him fumble like this for much longer, she might just do something stupid.

“Let me,” Ciri says, saving her. She’s been hovering, and now she steps in, voice leaving no room for argument. He grumbles wordlessly but lets her take the rag and scrub the blood from his skin before more gently cleaning the stab wound. As Yennefer returns to dealing with her own injury, Geralt holds still, hair hanging into his eyes, hands on his knees as if he’s meditating.

When Ciri finishes, she gets up, putting aside the bloodstained rag. After gingerly taking a clean one from the cooled pot, she looks at the potions. “That one,” Yennefer says, pointing at a jar with a herbal poultice.

“I don’t need that,” Geralt repeats. “Witchers don’t—”

“I know you don’t, but hush and let me take care of you,” Ciri tells him affectionately. “It’ll make me feel better, and it certainly won’t do you any harm, will it?”

And he hushes.

As Ciri treats and bandages him, Yennefer wipes away the blood that has dried on her skin and smears on some poultice of her own, eyes on her wound rather than on them and the gentle way they care for each other. She realizes Geralt’s watching her, his gaze heavy on her face. How can something so insubstantial be so weighty?

“Take care of your horse before she shits on the floor,” she tells him, seeing Ciri has finished. “There’s a well outside, and plenty of grass.”

He leaves without reply, still shirtless, leading Roach out the door of the cottage and letting it fall shut behind them. After a few seconds, she can hear the low sound of his voice.

“What happened to your arm?” Ciri asks her.

Yennefer’s hand fumbles as she tries to wrap the wound. “Magic requires sacrifice.”

“Oh.” Ciri’s eyebrows are knitted. “I can help you wrap that, if you want?”

“What?” Her fingers slip again; her jaw clenches. “I don’t need help.”

“It’ll be quicker. May I?” She waits for Yennefer’s reluctant nod, then moves in and finishes the dressing, her touch efficient but not rough. For a moment, they both stare at their hands. Yennefer resists the urge to run her finger along the edge of the bandage, then glances up.

Ciri is biting her lip, expression suggesting she wants to say something else but isn’t sure enough of Yennefer to know if she’ll be snapped at. Yennefer thinks of herself at that age, miserable and filthy, flinching from her stepfather’s voice and hands. She was as far as you could get from a princess, and Yennefer can’t imagine Ciri has felt so powerless or grotesque a day in her life. Still, there’s a fire in her eyes, one of curiosity and determination and ambition, and Yennefer feels something inside herself reaching back.

That scream. Ciri has power, and she’ll need someone to teach her how to channel it.

“You’re from Cintra, aren’t you?” Yennefer says. “Calanthe’s line?”

Ciri’s lips press together. She nods. “She took care of me. Until Cintra fell, and she died. Everyone died.” She draws a shaky breath in through her nose. “I was alone, and I just had to keep running.”

Yennefer is surprised by the surge of protectiveness inside her. She remembers feeling alone, crushingly so, even when surrounded by people. She remembers a shard of mirror, trying to escape and finding her escape snatched away.

“Well, Calanthe’s line is where you get your power,” Yennefer says briskly. “And you do have power, quite a lot of it, as I’m sure you know by now. Do you have plans for it?”

Ciri looks wary. “I want to be able to control it. I don’t want to kill anyone by accident.”

Yennefer doesn’t ask if she wants to learn to do it on purpose. Instead she says, ignoring the voice in her head that warns her not to rush ahead, “I could teach you.”

Wide eyes grow wider. “You?”

“Yes, me. I am a sorceress, as you may have gathered. I can’t make any promises about how long I could work with you, but I could at least start you off with the basics. Well?”

Ciri’s voice is almost reverent when she says, “I’d like that very much.” Her eyes drop to the ground; she scuffs a foot aimlessly, then again with purpose, frowning. “What, er, is this on the floor? Do you need help cleaning it up?”

Yennefer isn’t the type to blush, and she won’t start now. “No need.” She snaps her fingers, and the mess disappears; immediately she’s swamped with a rush of dizziness. _And that’s why you think before you cast,_ says the voice in her mind that sounds like a combination of Tissaia and herself.

As she steadies herself, Ciri reaches out. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Yennefer says automatically, the same instinct that just had her wasting magic on frivolities. And then, through a stupid, pointless knot in her throat, “Thank you.”

She pulls herself together. “I’ll ward the house. Someone could have tracked us here, and we’ll at least need a warning. You can watch and ask questions; consider it your first lesson.” She should have just enough power, as long as she rests afterward. She’d better.

“We’re staying here, then?” Ciri asks as she opens the door.

Yennefer half turns. “For the moment. Someone will likely come after you eventually.”

“Then what?” Ciri asks. “Will you come with us?”

From the yard, Geralt is watching her, his face unreadable, brush moving steadily against Roach’s coat. He looks better already, as pale as always but steadier, pupils less blown.

Will she? She swore not to let fate run her life. To be free, whatever it cost her. To live her life the way she wants to live it.

But how _does_ she want to live it?

She thinks of the way Geralt is with Ciri. She thinks of the fact that not once has Geralt tried to convince her to change her mind.

“Yes,” she says. She clears her throat. “Unless unwanted visitors come first, we’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

She starts to walk away to begin her circle around the cottage, but Ciri says, “Your spell. Will you tell me what it was about?”

“Not today.”

“But did it work?”

Yennefer sucks in a long breath. Looks at the girl with dirt on her face and curiosity in her eyes and magic in her voice. Doesn’t look at Geralt, whom she can hear bringing up a bucket from the well for Roach.

“We’ll find out.”


End file.
